Posts

The disastrous deluge of BP oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico evokes the memory of a blowout more than 40 years ago that, although not a carbon copy of the Deepwater Horizon incident, remains hauntingly similar in several important ways. The 1969 Dos Cuadras Offshore Oil Field spill in the Santa Barbara Channel was an unprecedented ecological disaster at the time caused by a natural gas-induced offshore rig blowout that caught the oil and gas industry off guard and required a tremendous effort to fix....

Tiny computers are everywhere—our cell phones, handheld gaming devices and set-top boxes, to name a few—so it should be no surprise that Marvell Technology in Santa Clara, Calif., one of the companies that makes the chips that go into such devices, managed to cram an entire home server into the SheevaPlug, a two-inch by four-inch (five- by 10-centimeter) box that plugs into any wall outlet and is almost indistinguishable from an oversize power supply....

Last year Donald Trump falsely claimed that the size of his inauguration audience was “the biggest ever,” despite photographic evidence to the contrary—one of his many demonstrable whoppers. Of course, neither candidate in the 2016 presidential election was seen as a paragon of honesty. Yet that seemed to hurt Hillary Clinton more than Trump. Why? New research suggests that sometimes lying can actually make a politician seem more authentic: followers see bald-faced lies by an interloper as symbolic protests against a crooked establishment....

Emperor penguins living in the Antarctic may be able to adapt to warming temperatures that are eroding their traditional breeding grounds, according to a study released this week. Using satellite imagery and aerial surveys, researchers found four penguin colonies that had moved their breeding area to floating ice shelves from the normal sea ice that they usually rely upon. Peter Fretwell of the British Antarctic Survey, the study’s lead author, said in a statement that the iconic birds usually breed on the sea ice because it gives them clear access to waters where they can find food....

As a combat engineer in Iraq, Jeremy was supposed to find roadside bombs. They found him instead. Within 72 hours of each other, two improvised explosive devices (IEDs) went off within 15 feet of this father in his late 20s. The first set of blast waves, a moving wall of highly compressed air that emanates from an explosion, knocked him out briefly. The second left him dazed for about 30 minutes and produced ringing in his ears that disappeared within a week....

By K. S. Jayaraman of Nature magazineAn increase in anti-nuclear sentiment after the Fukushima disaster in Japan in March has stalled India’s ambitious plan for nuclear expansion.The plan, pushed forward by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, aims to use reactors imported from the United States, France and Russia to increase the country’s nuclear-power capacity from the present 4,780 megawatts to 60,000 megawatts by 2035, and to provide one-quarter of the country’s energy by 2050....

Last August, less than a month before Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, raising questions of race, class and disaster preparedness, climate scientist Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a prophetic report: warming ocean temperatures are making hurricanes more powerful, he concluded. Global warming can not create storms out of thin air or force them to hit increasingly populated coastal areas. But the finding suggested that storms of high magnitude might become more common in the future, and in so doing it whipped up a tempest about the role of climate change in hurricane trends....

If you have got an idea for how to study Europa, then NASA wants to hear from you. The agency has no official plans for a mission to the Jovian moon, whose icy crust covers a watery ocean in which life could theoretically exist. But spurred by intense congressional interest and several recent discoveries, NASA is seeking ideas for instruments that could fly on a mission to Europa. The possibilities range from a stripped-down probe that would zip past the moon, to a carefully designed Jupiter orbiter that would explore Europa over many years....

Tucked beside fossils of long-gone gigantic sloths and knee-high horses stands a newcomer to the American Museum of Natural History’s extinction parade: Lonesome George, the last known Pinta Island giant tortoise. For four decades the 100-year-old reptile served as a conservation icon on Ecuador’s Galápagos Archipelago. His subspecies, hunted for meat and tortoise oil, all but vanished in the 1900s. George was its only survivor, and despite several attempts to get him to reproduce with giant tortoises from similar subspecies, he died without descendants on June 24, 2012....

By Eugenie Samuel ReichThe observation of an unexpected nuclear reaction by an unstable isotope of the element mercury has thrown up a rare puzzle. The enigma is helping theorists to tackle one of the trickiest problems in physics: developing a more complete model of the atomic nucleus.Nuclear fission, the process in which a nucleus heavier than that of iron breaks into pieces, is generally observed to be symmetric, with the resulting fragments being roughly equal in size....

When crop engineers from around the world gathered in London in late October, their research goals were ambitious: to make rice that uses water more efficiently, cereals that need less fertilizer and uberproductive cassava powered by turbocharged photosynthesis. The 150 attendees of the Crop Engineering Consortium Workshop were awash with ideas and brimming with molecular gadgets. Thanks to advances in synthetic biology and automation, several projects boasted more than 1,000 engineered genes and other molecular tools, ready to test in a researcher’s crop of choice....

Psychologists have long debated whether exceptional achievement demands raw talent or hard work. The development of artistic skill in children offers a window into the complex forces that define the first stages of mastery. As the drawings in this slide show reveal, some children discover new techniques and produce more complex compositions than others of the same age. Talent alone does not explain these artists’ virtuosity. They also possess a strong desire to engage with art and devote many hours to making it....

Quantum objects are notoriously shifty. Take the photon, for example. The quantum of light can act as a particle one moment, following a well-defined path like a tiny projectile, and a wave the next, overlapping with its ilk to produce interference patterns, much like a ripple on the water. Wave–particle duality is a key feature of quantum mechanics, one not easily understood in the intuitive terms of everyday experience. But the dual nature of quantum entities gets stranger still....

It may seem straight out of “Star Trek,” but it’s real: Scientists have created a sonic “tractor beam” that can pull, push and pirouette objects that levitate in thin air. The sonic tractor beam relies on a precisely timed sequence of sound waves that create a region of low pressure that traps tiny objects that can then be manipulated solely by sound waves, the scientists said in a new study. Though the new demonstration was just a proof of concept, the same technique could be adapted to remotely manipulate cells inside the human body or target the release of medicine locked in acoustically activated drug capsules, said study co-author Bruce Drinkwater, a mechanical engineer at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom....

This stunning book offers a bird’s-eye view of a changing Earth—each image taken by Steinmetz on a paraglider or by a camera attached to a drone. But it is not just another coffee-table book of photographs. Veteran journalist Revkin, who has devoted his career to covering a warming world, makes the strong case throughout that it is no longer enough to passively observe how the climate is transforming Earth. We must ask ourselves what kind of future we wish to create....

In 1927 ten leading physicists met in Brussels to formalize the new science of quantum physics, establishing a set of rules for the microscopic world that was completely incompatible with the existing set for the macroscopic world—and creating a paradox scientists are still trying to resolve. Sheilla Jones, a journalist with a degree in physics, captures the scientific and the human aspects of this meeting. The cast: Albert Einstein, celebrity and lone wolf; Niels Bohr, father figure getting left behind by the new mathematical physics; Paul Ehrenfest, passionate friend to both Einstein and Bohr; Max Born, anxious hypochondriac; Erwin Schrödinger, enthusiastic womanizer; Wolfgang Pauli, clown with a dark side; Louis de Broglie, French aristocrat; Werner Heisenberg, intensely ambitious young man; Paul Dirac, Englishman of few words; and Pascual Jordan, uninvited Aryan nationalist....

Deep under the ocean’s surface lies a treasure trove of new life forms, fuel sources and knowledge. But, given the darkness, freezing temperatures and crushing pressure, it’s not easy to get there. Indeed 95 percent of the ocean remains unexplored; we know more about the surface of Mars than we do about the seafloor. “More than half of the planet is covered by water more than 3,000 meters [two miles] deep,” says Chris German, chief scientist for the deep submergence group at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Cape Cod, Mass....

Cell-Phone Paradise Communication is at the heart of the future. A future city would need to respond to people on a personal level. Our cell phones can become devices that are able to open the door to our home, pay for our bus and subway charges, make purchases at any store with a tap and a password, and give us unfettered access to the Internet. —Craig Braquet, Long Beach, Calif. Wires of Light It’s time for cities to bring fast, reliable fiber-optic broadband to every home and business....

Key concepts Energy Power Forces Machines Introduction Have you ever ridden your bike into a strong wind? If so, did it feel really tough? How does this compare with how you feel when the wind is pushing against your back? Does that make you feel ready for the Tour de France? In this science activity you will explore how wind-powered devices, such as wind turbines and pinwheels, also react in different ways to wind direction....

Managers of a national park in the sea around Cancun realized that traffic was taking its toll on the Manchones Reef. Some 87,000 divers annually swam in the clear, blue waters surrounding the reef. Scuba divers and tour boats battered and frightened the sea turtles, queen angelfish, spotted trunkfish and other reef creatures. After some trial and error, park director Jaime Gonzalez Canto landed on a solution: to redirect tourists to an alternative spectacle....